Stress – Home and Work

I think I'm under stress right now. I'm in the middle of moving into our new home and I'm in the middle of launching our business.

The home is great and after 21 months of being homeless, it's great that it's all coming together. The only problem is we're downsizing – by about 65%. So we have WAY too much stuff and no place to put it. Something comes off the truck and we tell the movers to take it back to the happy place where we don't have to look at it. We have so much stuff that it's going to take a month to just to look at what we have – the movers show up every other day with a load we can digest (not the most economical move in techniques). We also have a rental house that I'm grabbing carloads of more stuff to dump into our new house. The good news is Renee is a purger – the bad news is she micro purges – every item must be inspected and evaluated for it potential to increase our happiness. I like to purge en masse – that box/truck of crap, don't open it – just take it away. To make matters worse there is still a lot of construction going on –right now there is a 20 foot scaffold in the middle of our entry way.

The business is/was scheduled to begin its initial launch sequence tomorrow. We are probably two weeks behind schedule. The hold up – getting the web site squared away – getting the bottles into the warehouse – getting the 3^rd party vendors happy and working with our systems - and testing testing testing. We will fix it all but if we delay too long we'll hit Christmas break and that's what we don't want. We want to launch when kids are in school. If we delay much longer, we might push our launch to January – which eats up more cash. Like all startups, we only have so much cash, so time delays are costly and stressful. The one part that isn't behind schedule is our grass roots launch effort. We have young adults waiting for us to launch. We wait too long and they'll lose interest.

Home and work are both stressful. My solution: I escape to work every morning to avoid the stress at home (thank God for my wife's organizational and management skills) and in the evening, I hurry home to escape the stress of work and the prospects of having to delay launch. How do I sleep? On an $89 air mattress from Costco – our bed situation is currently in flux.

Comments

[Symptoms of Stress]

You definitely do need to find a good way to balance the home life and work life.